Jim Beck Studio

Dallas, Texas recording studio owned by Jim Beck, the Dallas engineer who discovered Lefty Frizzell. Also recording at Beck's studio were George Jones, Ray Price, Floyd Tillman, and Marty Robbins. By 1950, the sound quality of the demo recordings made at Beck’s studio had begun to attract the attention of the major record labels. Columbia executive Don Law eventually brought artists from as far away as Shreveport, Nashville, and Los Angeles to record at Beck’s studio in Dallas. Country music historian Charles K.Wolfe wrote that Beck’s facility, while smaller than those in New York and Los Angeles, was “the studio that produced the most distinctive sound of all, the one that produced the most influential recordings, and the one that came within a hairbreadth of changing the whole direction of the music’s development.” Indeed, only Beck’s untimely death kept Columbia and Decca from moving their country recording operations to Dallas, a shift that might have resulted in “Big D,” not Nashville, becoming known as America’s “Music City.” Beck also did engineering for the Imperial, Bullet, and King labels.